


Painting Birminghams

by thenopetrain



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I thought it might be fun to poke around with Christmas being that taboo time of year on our show, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, Supernatural Elements, oh the canon possibility we are being robbed of, sobs forever, which is Conveniently timed with their fall break
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-05-04 20:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5347949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenopetrain/pseuds/thenopetrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His Decembers are never pleasant, and he doesn't think this year will be any different</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prelude to a Carol

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything. 
> 
> This idea sorta bit me a few weeks ago and I can't get rid of it. This is just a prelude chapter to toss me into the meat of the story. I should have the next chapter up either some time tonight or tomorrow. Enjoy!

He'd been planning his death for over fifteen years. The real death, not the one in Marrakesh. While dramatic, it had hardly been the way he should die. If anything, it only spurred him on to die right and true to himself no matter the circumstances. That incident had given him reason in defining such a meaning. He thought up specifics. Entertained the moment. What weapon might finally do him in. The pain. Whether he'd feel it creeping into his limbs or if he'd be numb. Slow or fast or instant. Whether he'd see it coming or if it would snuff him out. If shock would be too much to realize what might be happening. How his thoughts would be. Who he would think of. _Lizzie_. And that's where an illogical ideal had come to mind. He knew the way he'd prefer to go, but he was sure, after all these years, that he didn't deserve it. If a certain death could be a pipe dream…

"Quickly," He opens his eyes, the draw of a smile playing on his lips as he looks over in the general direction of Donald's cell. "But not too quickly." He can hear a rustling sound, a leg shifting somewhere in the dark. "When I first started down this road, I thought that, if I was lucky, I'd get to die looking at someone I love."

Ressler sighs and looks at the lock on his cell door, contemplates how fast he might be able to swing the thing open when it was time for them to retrieve him. If things had gone the way they did with Reddington, they'd haul him out and try to drug him. If he could get to them before that second part, he might have a shot. _Literally_.

"You're doing it again." They'd drugged the poor bastard every time they'd left. And Red gets chatty with whatever the stuff is; a pale yellow concoction. His cumulative, slurring narratives are a torture on their own. Especially, because of the life Red has lived. His poignancy, his depth…Red told him last time to stop him if he goes on too long. The time before that, Red simply passed out a short while after. And while Ressler is curious about this topic, he isn't too keen on getting too much of it.

"Donald, I've barely gotten started." Ressler can see a tremor race through the man. The sweat on his brow. How his fists clench in the restraints above his head. He wonders what the point is with Red telling him these things. He'd never thought about how he would die. Not because he didn't think he wouldn't. He just figured it would be a function of his job. A patriotic death. He knew he was taking a risk every day he went to work. He signed up for it. _Getting shot, stabbed, beaten captured…_ These were the dangers of his profession, a staple in the contract. It was the price he and his fellow agents would pay in service to their country _._

 _An honorable way to go._ If anything, he had only ever thought of his mother: what she would do, who would check in on her every Wednesday and Saturday, who would take her to Church when she couldn't drive herself, talk to her when she was missing dad. His friends and colleagues would mourn and move on or just straight up move on. His death would be a condition of the job. That's it. _A name on a wall._

"Just to see them. Their eyes would shine with tears. They'd tell me to hang on. Stay awake." A cough catches in Red's throat and he grunts at the discomfort in the way it rocks his body. Ressler notes that he seems to swallow with some difficulty. "I wanted to see the undeniable proof of love in their stare. Hear it in their voice. I wanted to be held close. Protected in those incredibly small seconds until death." By the heavy silence, Reddington knows he has Ressler's full attention now. "To feel safe."

"You're not gonna die, Reddington." Ressler gets that wave of restlessness and hunger in his belly. A kind of longing he can't put his finger on or give words to. Red's hopes always seem to pull on something visceral deep inside of him; dreams he hadn't known he'd dreamt. "You can't tell me you're gonna let these guys get the last of you."

"We don't _really_ know that, do we?" The criminal's voice is low and stifled by whatever is racing through his system; weakening and reducing him to a pale, sweaty, shaking man. Red's been here two days longer than him.

"Oh come on, it can't be that bad up there." Ressler gets scoffed at, but not much else. Red seems to have faded out for a second and the two of them lapse into silence. It's not like the last time they were stuck in a dire situation. There's no box. No one is bleeding out. They haven't even touched Ressler yet, except for the rough manhandling to get him in the cage he's in now. They didn't even secure his hands. Help is coming. _No way to stop Liz, Dembe, and the team from getting us back._ He looks to the subdued criminal in front of him and watches the man's eyes flutter open, and then closed, only for him to jerk awake again. _Good, keep with it, Red_.

"It could definitely be worse, I'll give you that."

"I think having someone set your leg on fire to cauterize your artery is pretty high on the pain scale." Making jokes at a time like this seemed to be exactly what would keep the old man awake. The sound of Reddington's laugh bounces around above them in the vaulted ceiling and Ressler finds himself suppressing a smile. He's struck by how relieved he is to hear that particular sound and how quickly his relief is frozen by the sound of Red's dry cough. The agent watches his chest rise and fall sharply where he lies shackled to the table. Reddington's face scrunches up a bit, his mouth ajar as he breathes. Somewhere under the vest and shirt, are bruises and potentially broken ribs where parts of his vest and shirt are singed. They've got him situated to make the more sensitive areas along his sides vulnerable; wrists tied down above his head, legs shackled to the end of the table.

"Not to start…a mine's bigger than yours contest, but you've clearly never been poisoned, Donald." Words breathless. Voice rough with pain. Red tries clearing his throat. "It grabs you by all the wrong things. Your intestines. Your throat. Your heart. Your brain. Your lungs. You can't even get the words out in time before you're on your back." His head falls back and forth against the steel table, unable, even in his weakened state, to keep the showmanship, the mannerisms that make him, at bay.

"Oh I don't know," Donald leans his back against the wall and raises his knees to rest his arms. "Electrocution looks pretty bad from where I'm sitting." There's a pale note of trepidation stuffed somewhere in Ressler's voice. He'd been watching the man get tortured for an hour or two at a time for about a day, now, knowing that it would be his turn eventually.

"It's not pleasant." The criminal's head falls towards Ressler a bit and he can see that his eyes are closed; brow furrowed like some thought is bothering him. "Did you know your blood is actually boiling inside of you when you get shocked by something? Essentially, your body is cooking."

"Is that what it feels like?" Might as well be mentally prepared for the kick Red's body gives every time they zap him. Red gives him a small shrug, face suddenly thoughtful.

"It burns. Like your muscles are on fire and you can't breathe and you can't shy away from the pain but your brain is screaming to try anyway. There's such an enormous freedom in knowing you're powerless." Ressler makes a face at Red's informative answer, thinking a simple 'yeah' would have sufficed. A moment later, there's a smile spread out on Red's face. Something ironic or revelatory. "If they keep going, I'll be Reddington a la carte, trussed up on a silver table. What is it with criminals and silver furniture for torturing, anyway? Everyone seems to have the same table or chairs or basements. Hell, even this warehouse is something-"

"Reddington stay with me on this alright?" He watches Red give that shiver again, the one from before. There's a tension in the criminal's muscles, a tightness he hadn't noticed the other times. "That shit they've been injecting, what's that doing to you?" _Besides scaring the hell out of me._

"The drug…It makes it hard to breathe. My heart's… _pounding_ …I feel anxious…a compulsion to speak…" Another spasm jostles Red's body and Ressler finds himself frowning. There were various drugs to weaken the minds of suspects. While it wasn't out of the scope of his government to apply extreme interrogation techniques, he couldn't be sure if Red was under the influence of barbiturates or something else. _Something to make him more compliant, to make him less of a threat_. Ressler knew that Red's fortitude under pressure had something to do with these small and extensive chats. The man would be in a zen-like trance during the actual interrogation, calm as Lake Placid, and then lapse into this nervous, Chatty Cathy.

"Then you have to stay awake and you should probably stop talking, they could be listening." _For God sake, please_. The sarcastic, exasperated dialogue he has going on inside his head doesn't denote how nice it is to have Red speaking as though they weren't captives and they were just two, dare he say it, friends discussing past grievances and sharing hopes. Torture and death weren't the usual topics but in this life, Ressler wasn't going to be picky.

"Hah, and they'll learn I want a somewhat quick death, which they will then deny me, and that I am feeling every bit of what they are doing to me, whilst getting next to zero information." Red shifts his torso a bit to the left, and strains against the restraints on his ankles, relieving his wrists and arms as much as he can with what wriggle room he has. "I think I'm alright with that."

Part of Ressler wonders if Red hopes they're listening. Hopes to piss them off, play a different game, to get at them by doing nothing, by doing the unexpected. Red seems to have run out of words for the moment, wincing at pain he isn't vocalizing. Feeling the silence stretch, a needling worry for Red's current condition, he figures, if Red is going to stay awake, he'd better start telling his own stories. Pull his own weight in the effort of staying alive until the cavalry gets here.

"Don't take this personally, but I still hate you a lot of the time." That pulls another laugh out of the man, and Ressler joins him a little. "I mean, you annoy the _hell_ out of me. As far as I'm concerned, we're destined to be enemies," Ressler's tone drops the amusement from before as he speaks, falling, gradually, into something raw and honest. "But dammit if I don't agree with you on what it takes to keep the people you care about safe in this world." It scared him, this part of himself; that undeniable readiness to tear across the world in order to protect his people. The rage that fuels itself on his pain; perceived or real. "I may not be as skilled as you are, but I agree with what is sometimes necessary even if I don't like the method." He stares at Reddington's prone figure and feels that restlessness again. "And I hate that I envy the moral freedom you have when it comes to doing what needs doing."

"We're not so different, Agent Ressler." Red shakes his head a little, chews on the inside of his lip as he stares up at the ceiling. "I'm curious to see who you'll become after all this." Red drags in a steadying breath and Ressler watches something at the foot of the table distract the criminal as his words sink in.

 _After all this,_ like they're all on some long journey together, like Reddington hasn't been pulling them along this whole time. Like he has chosen to stay with this task force for reasons beyond keeping America's Most Wanted in line. He likes his team. He likes putting away the guys they _didn't even know existed._ But in the end, really, he wasn't sure _why_ he was here. _Or why it bothers me that I don't._

"Agent Ressler," For as long as he can remember, he'd been doing his job because it was the job and he was passionate about being useful and honorable and honest. There was no need for him to examine _why_ when the structure of the FBI consisted of jobs well done and eventual raises. The occasional, political leaps were also in play, but again, that was just the job. " _Ressler."_

"What?" He focuses, and finds that Red is still looking at the foot of the table, his face haggard, breathing a bit too erratic.

"I'm hallucinating."

"Okay…" _Shit._ Whatever Reddington was seeing, it wasn't good. The man was coiled tighter than a snake, his jaw working furiously. He sits up a bit more, leaning forward, inches from the grate on the door to his cage. He watches the sweat bead on Red's forehead and he's about to say something to get his attention when the criminal flinches and tenses. "Reddington?" But the man doesn't seem to hear him. It's like whatever he's seeing is scaring him. Ressler's never seen this expression on Red's face before. A crumbling mess of shadows and guilt. "Red, look at me. _Hey_. Look at _me._ "

Red lets out this clenched sound and the next thing Ressler knows is the savage need to get out of the cage he's been put in.

"Shit." The rattling on the table is a hollow horror as Ressler moves back and slams his feet against the door to the cage. Again and again. The criminal's convulsions and the sound of Ressler trying to get out, bring their captors back into the room. The two goons that had shoved him into the cage pause as they take in the scene before they leap into action. Ressler pulls his legs back for one more, futile attempt at breaking free, and then makes himself watch as they unlock Red's wrists. They rotate his torso and position him on his side so he doesn't choke. The convulsions continue for a minute, and the swarm of people around the table are administering medication, an IV, undoing the shackles around his ankles. If they're this prepared, these people mean to keep them for a lot longer than he'd thought. Ressler gets a glimpse or two of Red's slack features, and he's about to ask if he's okay when there's a crash from the opposite side of the warehouse.

And all hell breaks loose.


	2. Saudade

It's just a chain, at first. Wrapped around a body he cannot see. The hook, thick and heavy, swings idly, lifted by invisible hands. It is just a glimmer, a trick of light, something to catch his eye in the dark. The chain comes closer, a nearing that cannot be jostled by regular steps. With it comes a face he'd discarded two years ago; a face that would never again smirk the way it was smirking now.

"It hasn't been long enough, Red." Anslo pauses at the end of the table and Red blinks a few times, trying to wash the image of the dead from his field of vision. "But, as fate will have it, here we are." Anslo swings the chain that's wrapped around with a flourished, circular motion and takes a step around the table. He pauses and glances at Ressler, cocking his head in surprise. "Such a hero, aren't you, Red?"

"Agent Ressler." Red finds that he can't look away from Anslo as the man looks back at him, his face shadowed in odd places, his skin not so substantial now that he's moved from his initial space. He's not as _real_ as he had appeared to be a moment ago. An incomplete illusion. _Doesn't make any sense._ He's hallucinated before. Probably too many times. " _Ressler._ " His heart rate spikes, his mouth bone dry. There's a boulder on his chest, nausea bubbling in his throat. His wrists, having long gone numb, chafe against the ties that hold them above his head as he tenses, and he eyes the hook in Anslo's hands. It's an unkind reminder for their last encounter.

"You know I've been following you around, Red. And what a bloody _dismal_ affair it's been." Anslo walks closer still, a calculated prowling until he's directly beside him. He looks at the hook, smiles, lets it dangle over Red's stomach; a pendulum swinging back and forth. "You recognize this, don't you, old friend?" _We were never friends._ Red wills the illusion away, turns his head just a bit to look beyond what's not supposed to be there. " _Ah-ah_ , none of that. That's not how this works." The chain swings towards his face, away, and then lands heavily on his chest. Red flinches at the very real weight of it, sucking in a breath that won't cure the windedness in him. "This game has rules." He points to the darkness at the end of the table, and Red sees the curly brown hair, the red nightgown, those scared blue eyes.

"I'm hallucinating." He gets out the word between breaths, and feels as though his tongue might stick to the roof of his mouth permanently. A violent emotion rips through him at the sight of a still and staring version of the young girl Lizzie had been.

"Bravo, Red!" Anslo reels back with a bark of laughter, dragging the hook and chain with him. Red strains against the ties and shackles that keep him secured to the table as Anslo approaches her. "Now listen up, because I don't have much time." Red can feel his face scrunch into something less than dignifying as Anslo drapes the hook over Lizzie's right shoulder and brings the slack to rest across the other. "You're _dying_ , Red. For people like _you_ , there are…protocols. And while I would love nothing more than to discard them, I am, quite literally, _bound_ in such a protocol. "

Anslo looks displeased with the whole affair, studying the younger Lizzie as she simply stares at Red. After a moment, the illusion scoffs and shakes his head, a languid, lazy movement. Something remorseful and determined dashes across Anslo's face when he turns away from Lizzie to look back at Red; it eats up the blank stare in his ruined eye, fills it's milky appearance with emotion that should not be possible. This look, the desperate sorrow that clings to Anslo, strikes Red and he finds that he's holding his breath.

"Reddington?" Ressler's voice is an echo compared to the noise that Anslo's eyes are making.

"I wanted to be like you, I wanted a _chance_ , I looked up to you, Red. _You._ " The hook is back in Anslo's hand, no longer swinging or dragging. Aside from the disturbing images in front of him, Red can't seem to reach that place of calm he so easily accesses in times like these. There's nothing to grasp, no strand of stillness in the chaos of his body's malfunctioning state. "But you were never who I thought you were." Anslo is beside him again, peering down at him with a heavy and knowing stare. An expression hungry for truth. "I _regret_ not being able to see it in life." Regret. The word that ended his life and haunted him still.

"Red, look at me." Donald's attempts to get him to focus are useless as Lizzie takes a halting step forward. She reaches for his legs, her hand nearly around his ankle, when Anslo's attention whips in her direction. The two hallucinations face off for a moment, Anslo's face full of fury and want for recompense. " _Hey._ Look at _me._ "

" _That,_ " Anslo's eyes dart down to Lizzie's hand and then back to her face. She looks impatient, young and old in equal measure; timeless and unwavering. _Ancient._ "Isn't your job yet." Job. Yet. Red feels sick, the need to vomit almost unbearable. He can't seem to get any words out. Knows he should be asking some kind of question. Realizes that he should try to turn himself as best he can before he gets sick in this position and suffocates. But he feels disjointed, his thoughts racing in no particular direction despite his trying to focus. "It's _mine._ "

Anslo raises his hand up and drives the hook into Red's chest. The pain rips into him. His mouth opens in exclamation, and for a moment, there's nothing but the sensation of that cold metal in his body. _It's not real._ In the finite moments after, Anslo's smirk is less malicious and far more envious as he pushes on the hook, feeling some sort of pull. An out of body experience, a foggy confusion. His eyes clench shut as everything around him seems to get sucked into itself, the sensation of moving without going anywhere, and the moment is gone.

* * *

Momentarily blinded, Ressler hunkers in the cage, body in a fetal position to protect himself. There's a fantastic ringing, accentuated by _pops_ of stun grenades and gunfire, in his ears. When the bangers seem to end, he raises his head and finds the people that were surrounding Red a moment ago are either on the floor or stumbling away from the table. Ressler knows well the loss of balance and discombobulation brought on by those grenades. Being on the receiving end of a raid is no picnic, and he's thankful that he's not on his feet right now.

One of the goons from earlier has found his rifle and raises his gun towards the dark figures at the far end. The guy barely gets the weapon up before he's shot down. Through the ensuing smoke and chaos, comes an unfamiliar tactical unit. Some younger guys check the downed assailants around Red, while older, more experienced men flock to the criminal on the table, and, suddenly, Liz is crouched right in front of him.

"Ressler, you alright?" Her face is dirty and her eyes are alight with adrenaline. Slung over her shoulder is a tactical rifle he knows she didn't get from sanctioned distributors. Behind her, Dembe and a man in a ponytail join the sentries around Reddington.

"Yeah, I think one of them has the keys." He looks at the lock on the cage door and then tosses his chin at the goon they'd shot. But Liz just stands up, positions the rifle in her hands, and hits the lock twice with the butt of her weapon. _Hard._ When the thing breaks, she gets the door open and reaches for him. Ressler lets her take him by the forearm, and they get him standing. "Red had a seizure not too long ago, they were helping him, I think. Stabilizing him before you guys got in here." He gets a nod in return, and watches her relay the information to Dembe. She wears determination like a crown. Something primal and, so very _right_ , adorns her persona in this moment. He blinks, finds he barely recognizes her, and then watches her cast a weary glance over Reddington's still form.

"We're gonna be leaving soon." She's made eye contact with Dembe, the small glance enough to make Ressler's stomach flip. _Red's in bad shape._ He watches Liz shiver, like she's mentally and emotionally pulling herself away from the image of the man on the table as his team surrounds him. She looks back at him again, frowns at her assessment of her ex-partner, and Ressler wonders how beat up he looks. "You good to walk? You seem out of it." There are tears in her eyes that neither of them will point out. Maybe when this all started, Ressler would have comforted her, offered some kind of assurance, but they aren't the people they used to be, and those tears aren't for him.

"I'm fine." The hard look he receives almost makes him laugh. _Almost_. "Honest." Getting his ass kicked was part of the daily grind. What was the big deal about a stun grenade to the face? He moves towards the table, his eyes on Red's unconscious figure, but Liz's hand reaches out and stills him. There's a medical team coming in from the far end. "I should tell them what I know." Liz meets his eye for just a moment, an unspoken need for information present in her stare, but she relinquishes her hold on him.

"Right." The prospect of more damage, more pain, more danger to add onto what she can already see seems to have made her shut down. She accompanies him to where they're prepping Reddington for transport, and then excuses herself. Ressler looks up from where he's indicating to Red's singed vest, and the needle pricks in the left arm. He's explaining their captor's routine to Dembe when Liz starts to move away. He watches her extract a burner phone from the pocket of her jacket and flip it open. She takes one last look back at them, her eyes heavy with that same, watery expression from before. Whoever she's calling seems to answer. Liz turns, speaking definitively, and starts moving towards the far end of the warehouse.

Before Ressler knows it, she's out of sight.

* * *

He's in their house, hand to his chest. Anslo is gone. The hook with him. But the chill that permeates his chest is raw and aching. Red finds himself bent over his knees, sucking in the air he'd been unable to adequately acquire on that table. As he begins to realize the gravity of his surroundings, the hard wood under his feet, the white knitted booties that the younger Lizzie is wearing on her feet. He looks up and finds her there beside him, staring at him with naked concern.

"What is this?"

"A reminder," The sound of excitement and the distinct noise their fridge used to make when it closed stops him from replying. He looks back at Lizzie in confusion. She smiles at him, an enormously sorrowful expression that leaves him inching his way towards the kitchen. He lends his hand to the wall for support, finds it as sturdy and real as the hook had felt when Anslo laid it on his chest. When he peers around the corner, he is taken by the image of his wife and daughter gathering bowls and supplies around the far end of the counter. Their backs are to him in their tiny space, and not for the first time in his life, does he think of how perfect this image is.

His wife whispers something to their daughter, smiling. There's a wrinkle in her nose that creates a pit in his stomach so deep and filled with excitement, nervousness, and desire that he has to lean against the wall so that the image doesn't bring him to his knees.

"You're crying." Lizzie's little voice startles him and he finds his arms feel too heavy to bother lifting them to touch his cheeks. He looks at her, eager to see the truth of it in her eyes. What he finds there is a resolute soul that regrets the decision to show him this. Ignited by promise and delusion he sucks in a breath and looks back at his little family. Hope stirring, a bird with a broken wing.

"If I reach out...would they feel me? Am I able to-" _Hold them._ He can't look to Lizzie now as he asks, his voice quiet with longing; deepened by a nascent tone of emotion.

"No." Dead. A stone dropped straight to the bottom.

"It's okay." _It's worse than torture._ He wants to stay here, watching this, forever. _You're crying._ Of course, he would cry. When the sounds and smells and loves of a life gone by had been returned, there was nothing else to do but cry. This profound joy, and the simultaneous heartache, produced nothing else but the anguish gliding down his cheeks and dropping onto the front of his vest. "It's okay." A whisper, nothing more.

"It's _not_ okay." He looks to her when she says this, physically feeling the frustration and anxiousness laced in her voice. _Or perhaps it is the memory of her voice._ He cannot be certain. "I have more to show you. _Had_ more to show you."

"More? Lizzie, what's going on?" If he was dead, then this was the heaven he did not deserve. The girl Lizzie used to be shakes her head at him, a frown furrowing her brow. Everything he remembers her being is not who she is beside him. A hybrid between suffered wisdoms and youthful confidence.

"If you keep getting this emotional, I won't be allowed to guide you through them all." She reaches out her hand to him and he finds himself so torn with dismay, that whatever his outward reaction, it makes her drop the proffered hand. "Look, this isn't like those other times you dreamt of something nice, Red. You're weak, and we have to work with what we have." _We_. He doesn't know who 'we' is and he doesn't want to leave. "I can only show you what was, I can't let you keep it."

It might be the most awful thing she has ever said to him. Can't let him keep them. Can't let him touch them. Hold them. Talk to them. Can't let him surround himself in their voices or the smell of their hugs, engulfed in the unique scent of their hair. All the little facets he can't remember or recreate to soothe himself.

"It's not real anymore, Red." He looks between Lizzie and the kitchen as if, by another divine intervention, a loophole will present itself to him. But all he sees is Lizzie lift her hand towards him again. "Come on." He catches sight of the calendar on the fridge, sees the red circle on September 20th, 1989. A Wednesday. _A reminder_.

"I remember this." He looks at her with a smile. He knows this day. He can place it. He can see the events in all their mottled glory, but what happens hasn't happened yet. Her and now, he's waiting for the part he needs.

"We have to leave this behind."

"Please. Let me stay just a few minutes longer. Please, Lizzie." She drops her hand, her voice far away, dented by his lack of cooperation.

"That's not how this works." The little girl he'd known that night is watching his wife and daughter bake, her eyes and face far more like the woman he knows now than the child she'd been. His daughter lets out a squeal of laughter and Red's chest wrenches at the sound. She tosses flour at his wife and he blinks at the sight of the two of them, wishing with everything he was that they could see him. He feels joyful and sick to his stomach all at once. "Take it," he looks down at Lizzie's outstretched hand and steps away from her, shaking his head.

"Wait." He looks at her and the edge he'd seen in her expression ignites but she looks back at the two, then at the door. She knows what's coming as well.

"Red." He ignores her as the sound of keys turning the lock at the front door grabs the attention of his girls. Raymond walks just around the corner of the wall so he has full view of the foyer. His younger self drop the duffle from his shoulder to make room for his daughter to jump into his arms. He watches his daughter's arms go around his neck as they spin around once and he waits for the slight hiss of pain on his part. His daughter leans away from his face, her eyes serious and tone scolding,

" _Daddy_ ," as she gently brings her little hand to tap at the edge of the bandage laid along the juncture where his neck slopes into his shoulder.

"It's just a scratch, pumpkin. See?" His girl is having none of it, and the younger him laughs a little before he tilts his head so she can inspect it better. He'd been careful to school his features. Almost feels the phantom pull on the injury as he stands there. Red remembers hoping nothing had started to seep through. One of the stitches had come a little loose when he nodded off in the plane.

That had been the job that started all of this mess. A knife, a forger, and some documents he wasn't supposed to see. How corning an ally had revealed what a true enemy might look like. Red startles at the sound of his wife's voice next to him, his name on her lips, and he looks over to see her worried eyes. That already-tight smile. "Tell mommy it's just a scratch." The younger him is speaking, but Red watches, amazed, as the entirety of the conversation he remembers having this night flashes briefly in his wife's expression. A whole subtext to be discussed later.

"No." Red whispers his daugher's response, with a fond remembrance, as she says it, and he turns to watch the younger him balk; the smile he sees now is far less teasing and far more nervous. The panic he'd felt, the betrayal, is written starkly on his younger version's face. She puts her hands on his cheeks and brings their faces a little closer, a mimicry of her mother's affections. "You only hug me that tight when you're sad."

She kisses his nose and squirms out of his arms until she's standing in front of him. She's not wrong. When she fell off the swing and broke her arm after she turned four, he held her after they got home from the emergency room. When his first assignment turned out to be more stressful than he'd planned, he'd come home late, scooped her up from her crib, and then fell asleep on the couch with her resting on his chest.

His wife had been panicked that next morning until she'd found them. When he'd missed her dance and piano recital, he'd demanded two days off to take them camping so he could make her smile at him again. There may or may not have been multiple gifts after that incident as well. All those times and countless others, he'd come home and spun her around in that all-encompassing hug.

"Red," he turns away from what his family used to be, sees Lizzie's hand held out to him again. "You have to take my hand." His jaw clenches as he looks at her, hears his wife beckon their daughter to her, hears himself say something about putting his bag up stairs, and he steels himself at the sound of his little girl stalking towards her mother.

If he turned around now he'd be in just the right position to fool himself into thinking she's walking towards him and not her mother. That if he just side stepped and stood in front of his wife, he could pretend to be the choice. Instead, he stares resolutely at Lizzie's hand and reaches out for it.

The moment their hands touch, Red finds himself choking on the smell of blood. Reeling away from Lizzie and colliding into the banister where the desperately scared younger him makes a dash up the stairs; a madman calling their names, pushing doors open too forcefully, making noises of grief he hadn't remembered making, calling for them again. Red looks to Lizzie and finds her crying; a silent wash of anguish and guilt. He shakes his head, and reaches for her, but she backs up. He finds her terrified of him, looking around her at things he cannot see.

"Lizzie give me your hand," _Please, take us away from this_. She's panicking in front of him. Gasping. Crying. Shaking her head. The younger him runs by them, jumping over the railing on the stairs to go into the kitchen. The sound of his calling and running down into the basement is a haunting background to his distress at seeing Lizzie like this before him. "Give me your hand, Elizabeth."

" _Give me your hand!_ " She screams at him. Fire suddenly engulfing them. The stench of blood gone, the acrid, unbreathable air around them now suffocating. He looks around for the younger him, and finds him lying on the ground, the flames just starting to lick at his coat. He doesn't need this. He knows everything. "You have to give me your hand!"

"Why are you showing me this?" The sound of the fire and the house coming down around them makes him yell and the flames between them are as hot as they were that night. Lizzie reaches out for him, and he hears the full exclamation as she burns herself. She isn't looking at him, she's looking at her wrist, eyes glittering with the mirage of the fire around them. Red reaches for her, pushed back by circumstance and emotion, anger and defeat. This isn't how it happened. This isn't what he was told. He didn't save her, dammit. But she's not paying attention to him. Just staring at the bubbled skin on her wrist and hand as though frozen.

"Lizzie, now!" This ghost of the woman he knows seems to remember herself. She casts her burning, teary eyes at him before reaching out the rest of the way through the flames to grab his hand and pull him through.

* * *

He lands in the Piazza della Repubblica and finds himself without her. The roar of the fire is just an echoing horror in his ears, too concerned with looking for her than the time or date of his newest illusion.

"Lizzie?" He turns around and finds the square fairly empty. The panic he would normally feel in moments where he could not find her is notably absent. It strikes him, the calm he feels after what he'd seen. That sick feeling still accompanies him, the rush from the fire as distant as the roaring flames. What he knows now is that he won't be faced with the family he had to leave behind, and somehow that sick feeling gets pushed back beneath the complicated layers of his grief.

The light snow that flurries around him glows golden with the lights adorning a central pine just beyond the archway. He finds himself illuminated by the light, trapped in the night, spying a few couples milling about, and a man that walks in the shadows. All at once, he is frozen with recognition as the man stops under the awning of one of the darkened shops; hunches there for a moment, breath billowing away from him. Another spectre of himself, trying to flee his own torments. The night he was supposed to meet Lizzie in the apartment near the Cattedrale. It wasn't a far walk, but he knew he wouldn't be joining her. Not tonight. Not any night after what he pulled to land himself here in the first place.

"I think it's time I confirmed what's happening to you, Ray."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes. It's finally done. A bit longer than I planned, but Ressler wanted his two scents, so I had to add that part in haha let me know what you think! The next chapter should be up in a few a days.


	3. Litost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Holy Toledo, guys. I'm so sorry for the late update. (So much for getting this done before Christmas) I had a ton of family stuff going on and relatives in town. My goodness, I didn't think I'd lag this far behind. For new readers, this takes place during Christmas. We're gonna pretend that Liz didn't get caught, and that the chase goes on for a lot longer than they're letting on, and that Liz and Red are actually stuck spending Christmas together. I've been playing with this chapter for a while, cause the dialogue was giving me grief, and I didn't want it to just be a filler chapter. Not so sure I succeeded in that or not haha but here it is! The next one is in the works. Sorry, again, for the wait!

She finds Dembe on the phone in the foyer. The mansion they've requisitioned has ceilings high enough to echo even the lightest of footfalls, but he manages to somehow keep his voice low enough as he's talking so that she doesn't hear anything except the deepest notes of his baritone. Not enough to discern words, but enough to let her know he isn't just moving his lips. She isn't sure what she's going to say to him. _How?_ If she'll be able to keep it together. If the emotion she has kept suppressed will bubble up and choke her.

The few, determined strides she takes to close the distance between them are watched carefully, and if she weren't so wrapped up in corning him, she would have acknowledged that she faltered a little. His gaze is intense and she's worried that there is more showing on her face than she would like. He snaps the phone shut, a quiet sound that cuts into the air, and extends his arm to the sitting area to her right. Liz takes in a sharp breath and leads the way to the two chairs situated by the window. Everything is extravagant here. _Expensive, old, a stranger's home to protect what's dear._ She recognizes the fact that her thoughts have taken on Red's distinct pondering.

Words on words and sideways truths.

"Elizabeth," It's the way he says her name when they've seated themselves that makes her chin wobble, and she clenches her hands in her lap. She can't lose her nerve just yet.

"It's on his whole back, isn't it?" Measured and horribly controlled for how fragile she feels inside. The memory of a man lying facedown on the floor - no the snow. Their past, the re-collecting of the pieces, are jumbled and confused. She thinks she knows the answer and then she doesn't. Thinks she knows what she did that night and then she doesn't. It wasn't fair of him to keep all the information. She'd killed her father, that's what he confirmed. How could the rest of it be worse? How could any of it be worse? "The _scarring_ , it's-" She makes a sweeping gesture with her hands, extracting them for the cure of restlessness.

"Yes."

Yes. So she doesn't have to ask again. Yes. Because Dembe is merciful with his patience and his love. Yes. All over his back. The echo of the fire that forever linked the two of them. The pain. The loss. She's the key and he's the lock to the door they long to see behind. _Puzzle pieces with obscure edges._

Her eyes stray out towards the garden beyond the window. The old smell of the house is no longer a comfort. It suffocates her. If the memory of Christmas turned the most careful person she knew into a reckless, suicidal idiot...if the guilt of whatever he did that night was so bad that he went out and got himself abducted...sitting here, having Dembe watch her with his heavy compassion, she finds she can't reconcile her anger and her grief. The melding of the two feels so much like terror that it seized her mind; trapping her in the images she can recall and the lies they were twisted into so she wouldn't remember.

"We're safe here, right?" She needed to hear it. Grappling with this revelation, with Red's suffering, with what should be a shared pain...she needed this one thing. Right now.

"For now," Because Dembe wouldn't lie to her and this world is never safe. Vigilance was now a lifestyle. A demand for survival. "We have everything necessary for a quick and quiet departure." In other words, _don't worry_. She nods, a small and trailing thing as though she wants to say something more but lacks the words. His gentle eyes soften even further and he smiles. "You're going to be okay, Elizabeth." _Promises, promises._ She feels that lump in her throat again; either from her gratefulness or her frustration she isn't sure. The two emotions were so compounded, so simultaneous, these days that she could never tell. But she manages a smile and gets up, her stomach in knots.

"I'm gonna go check in on Ressler." She hadn't forgotten about her partner but, after what she'd seen in the ambulance, she'd...shut down. _Distance_. She had needed it. She didn't know how to operate lately, feeling off and incredibly out of her depth. She didn't need Ressler knowing how wrecked she'd been earlier. Walking up the stairs, Liz knew that she would have to face Mr. Kaplan eventually, as well. _As if being on the run wasn't enough._ It was time to face things. Really face them. It would be the first time talking to her ex-partner since she'd been vilified, since she'd shot the Attorney General. There was a certain amount of trepidation in each step she took up the stairs, drawing ever closer to a point she didn't think she was ready to reach. It's what she'd been trying to do for two years. Come to terms with who she knew herself to be while trying to fit into the perimeters set by her peers and by the law she could seem to abide. Come to terms with her childhood, her past and all it contained.

_...You can face it and confront it. Engage it. And maybe- maybe you prevail and rise above it..._

It's as though his sonorous voice in her ear, urging her forward, filling her up with a simultaneous warmth and a chaotic exasperation. Telling her to pursue this, _pursue him_ , and, inevitably, pursue the truth.

* * *

Next to him in the light, Sam draws a hand out of his jacket and grips Red's left shoulder in an affectionate gesture; steering him away from the center of the Piazza and towards the shadows where this other him had stopped.

"I told them that it might be too much," Red is captivated by the much younger, healthier image of his long time friend. Sam looks…resplendent in the soft light emanating from the Christmas tree. There's nothing sallow about his cheeks or eyes, his hair retains the color it had from his prime, from youth, and he's giving Red a smile that knots all the guilt and shame within his being. "I'm sorry that you couldn't- I wish this display of theirs allowed for _more_." More time, more options, more freedom. Red gets the impression of being watched in spite of being invisible to the world around him and Sam. Judged. Examined.

Sam turns his attention to the man in the shadows and Red watches himself, just four days earlier, as he trudged on through the snow; ignoring the buzzing burner phone in his coat pocket. Ignoring all of it. Sam has yet to move the hand upon his shoulder, and Red, feeling oddly quelled by the sight of himself before his abduction, remains quiet in anticipation of Sam's explanation. For want of more words than profuse apologies in the wake of everything he's done these past two years, he exhales to find that his breath isn't a substantial entity here even though he can feel winter's biting cold.

"Them?" His old friend gives him a smile that echoes the sardonic memory of a time gone by; holding all the necessary secrets.

"What you saw earlier were key fragments of your life: pieces for the desires of both sides." Red catches sight of himself up ahead of them. He remembers the desperate frustration with the phone. He remembers the coiled grief in his stomach. That feeling between nausea and a desire to scream or cry or-

_The phone breaks in his hands._

Red finds he can't reach anything but the most poignant of emotions from what he'd experienced with Lizzie just minutes ago. The awful longing for his girls. The terror in his helplessness during the fire. The frustration over his lack of control in this...illusion.

"It's a test, Ray." They stop just five feet from the brooding version of himself; an angry, wayward vision of a man pining after ghosts. A memory's ghost. Seeing the shadows on his own face, the war, the lines, gives him a hollow emotion; a floundering worse than a balloon in the wind.

"Isn't it always?" He has to make himself speak. He has to force his lips to move as he watches himself in his misery; nearly sucked into the cycle of silence and indignation. The moment is right there in front of him and he can taste it, bitter and pitiful on his tongue.

"Don't be a smart ass," Sam's stepped between him and himself, a smile dying on his face. "I need you to focus. I need you to be aware that there is a wrong answer here, brother. That what you see and how you react, the answers you give when it's over, will determine whether or not you stay in the game."

"You mean whether or not I get to survive."

"Not so much if," Red knows he's frowning, making a face that shows he isn't following. "But _how_. You've had a helluva year, Ray."

"Hell of a life." Subdued by irony, his eyes slide back to the figure of himself just over Sam's shoulder. There's a sliding feeling, a wooziness that overcomes him as he watches himself look back in their direction, knowing full well that his thoughts had lingered on Lizzie. The look on her face when she found him staring out the window. When he couldn't explain to her why there was devastation on his face, in his eyes, why his voice was so rough. She and Dembe weren't supposed to be back for another three hours.

_Half the amount of time I asked to be alone._

_Alone_ was not a new request from him to his friend. Dembe had suggested to Elizabeth that they go and see the city. She'd agreed, of course, and Red had ushered them out the door with enough pomp and flourish that Lizzie hadn't even gotten to ask why he wasn't coming with. _I should have known._

"Butterball's figured you out," He hasn't even noticed that Sam has resumed his position on his left, watching him as he watches himself with a smile that recalls years and years of gratitude and enormous, self-sacrificing love. Knowing. Understanding. The benefit of the doubt. No bullshit. There is so much about this man that Red misses. "Well," Alive with restlessness for the next leg of the journey, Sam turns and holds out his hand to him. "Christmas-present waits for no man." There's a subtle, _not even you_ , in his good friend's voice, and Red, sparing another glance at the earlier vision of himself, grips it, and the world they occupied pulls away from him.

* * *

A maddening hush has engulfed the second story hallway. Lined with rooms, littler studies, an office on the far end, it stretches out before her as though it will never end. _Two doors down on the right._ Ressler is waiting for her. Technically, he's being detained on her behalf by Red's people. Semantics aside, she pauses to listen for any form of sound coming from the middle of the hall. Taut in fear of having to face Mr. Kaplan and the room they'd put Red in, _fourth on the left,_ she draws in a breath. _Pull it together, Keen._ Ressler. She had to deal with Ressler.

The fact that he'd been there, that he'd gotten mixed up in this…that he'd gotten _that close_ to Red made her nervous in that same, possessive way she's felt upon first meeting Samar. It was new to her, this feeling. She was no longer what she used to be to them. Partner, agent, subordinate…the best in her class now a world class criminal. _A murderer._ She'd been so caught up, at first, with clearing her name, that she hadn't stopped to ask if she cared. And now, with the wolves growling at their door, she wasn't so sure a good, public name mattered anymore. _The truth matters_. If she had to bend the rules to get to that truth, so be it.

She steps up to Ressler's room, gives one final look at the door hiding Red, his doctors, and Mr. Kaplan from the world, and then turns the knob. Liz finds Ressler sitting across the room from two men in Baz's crew, hooked up to an IV and looking none-too-happy about his situation. The men glance at her and she dismisses the two of them with a smile and a quiet 'thank you'.

"You look like you're doing better." She tries for a smile as she takes a seat across from him at the small table and leans back, examining him as he stares at the door and then looks at the needle in his arm.

"My brain is still kinda...rattling around, but I'm good." A shrug and a boyish smile are afforded to her, and she nods as his expression grows a bit more serious. _"_ What's going on here, Keen?" He fixes her with a stare she's seen countless times before and all those other times, in recent memory, were moments when she had to lie. _Not gonna do that now._

"Two of the men are gonna drop you at your place once one of Dr. Renovich's nurses clear you." The statement seems to freeze the look on face, a kind of composure she'd seen when he'd been struggling with those pills. The kind of face that says he's closing up a vulnerable part of himself. The part reserved for her when they were partners. "What?"

"Nothin'." He'd taken his time answering her, and she feels the unsaid comments as if they were burning in the air between them. "I-uh, just thought we'd be going after those guys." She can't tell him that there is already a team rounding up the men that took Red, that they're being taken care of as they speak, that there was no way in hell she was going to include him in the sordid details of this life she was just stepping into. _Even I don't know all the details, yet._ And maybe Dembe would keep the darker parts from her. But one thing was certain, she would find one man or woman to tell them who had been following them in Italy. _One_. That's all it was going to take.

One person.

One word.

One night.

One fire.

One scar.

Two secret keepers.

Her life has been a series of singular events snowballing into full on shit storms.

"We've already taken care of it." It's a lie. Not her best, but it isn't so far from the truth that he notices. What seems to push him away is exactly what she expected.

" _We?_ " God she hates the way he's looking at her. His tone. The fear from that lady in the diner was one thing, but the total disbelief on Ressler's face, the hurt in his eyes...she clenches her jaw. "Look, after what happened, I won't ask you to turn yourself in, but I will catch you eventually, and this will be over, and you _can't_ keep venturing down this path, Liz. Look at where you are, Keen." Surrounded by the people of one of the world's most notorious criminals. Framed for acts of terror. Grappling with barely realized memories and obvious trauma. Red. "There is- there _are_ things that can keep you from ever feeling the light again. You know who told me that?" She shakes her head, watching him with all the regret she feels, and finds she has a pretty good idea who'd said that. "Reddington. Right before I went after Tanida."

"That old life-" She looks at him as he watches her, losing the words she wanted to say, losing the will behind them. She stumbles on the sentence and drags in a breath to steady herself. There are emotions she can't name writhing in her chest, that send her heart into a frenzy; getting her worked up. Frustrated. Angry. "It wasn't real. What I want? Nothing matters but the Truth." The truth about the Cabal. About Connelly. About her mother. About Red. About herself. "The rest..." _will come._

"Keen, I can help you." What brand of justice does she want? What kind of filth does she want to toss her friends into? Aram, Ressler, they were the ones she had to protect at this point. Cooper knew the darkness better than he let on. Samar was already, sort of, working for Red. _And me, by extension._ "Let me." She barely hears him, can barely look at him. Fear and shame has her clammed up. Ressler is a good person. A loyal friend. She has given him the benefit of the doubt this entire time and she wondering if she was wrong to have done so. She can't think about that, she can't entertain the idea that he's blind to the gray area this time, because right now, there are voices in the hallway, and she wonders, with a jolt, if Red's awake yet, and what the verdict is.

How long they'll have to stay here.

How long he'll need to recover.

And just like that, her train of thought is drawn back towards the man that holds all the secrets, plays his cards close to the vest, _too damn close_ , and tries, like a shepherd and master chess player, to herd and move everyone into position. She couldn't drag Ressler into this world. She doesn't think he'd let her. And, thus, the impasse they found themselves in now.

"I'm grateful to you, you know I am," her eyes trail off to the IV in Ressler's arm, to the bruising on the side of his face, and back to taking in the dusty condition of his dress shirt and slacks. The look on his face tells her that he knows he isn't going to win this discussion. That she'd decided who to turn to a long time ago and it wasn't him or his government. Justice was wearing a fedora and a three-piece suit, not a badge and an issued glock. "You gave me the benefit of the doubt when you let me escape, and I _know_ you know that this is bigger than just clearing my name. It- _that?_ It doesn't matter anymore."

She flipped and flopped, constantly, back and forth, in her mind about whether or not she cared if people believed her to be a terrorist; if she cared about the media. To a certain extent, clearing her name would keep her safer, less recognizable, and less notorious in the months to come, but it seems that the damage has been done.

"It _does_ matter. Look, Cooper brought Tom in on it, they're close to getting Karakurt." She anticipated how quickly he would insist otherwise, as if, by some twist of fate, clearing her name would make her feel whole and good again. But a name wasn't going to bring about any fantasy. _I don't have to know who I am to know what I want._ Everything she'd worked for and achieved had been ruined because of her actions and hers alone. "You're not a terrorist, you're not a criminal, and we can prove it if you _just_ come in with me." The sinking, sickening feeling of digging herself into a hole had always been there, and now, with Ressler filling her with that fantasy, the _maybe_ in all the harsh definites, she was finally greeting her culpability with a numb affection. "We can fix this."

Maybe they could. Maybe she could work with him and accept whatever plan it was to get her exonerated, maybe she could fix it with Karakurt's confession...but in the end, it was still a huge 'maybe' it was still just an ideal. She meets her ex-partner's eyes and absorbs that fierce loyalty, that honest desire to do the right thing, and then she rises and sheds the notion of that comfortable light inside of her. It may not be safe in the dark but she at least had some idea of how to navigate the trenches, and a professional criminal to help her wade through the dark waters of her past and present.

"We captured some of the people that were holding you and Reddington." In the safety of a change in topic, she won't have to look at his quiet disbelief and that bit of resignation she sees in his expression when he leans back into his chair. _Is it really that unbelievable?_ That she would choose a criminal life for a little bit longer if it meant a more secure end? She supposes that they can talk about how the ends don't ever, _really_ , justify the means, but it would be pointless. A waste of breath. "They'll be dropped off with you at your place. All the information they've given Dembe will be relayed to the team after you've secured them." They couldn't have the information falling into the wrong hands. As time sensitive as everything was, as vulnerable as Red's inhibitions had made them, they couldn't afford any mistakes in this next leg of their sprint to infiltrate the Cabal.

"And what?" Ressler's tone has her drawing back into herself, casting that perfect, icy stare she'd adopted during her training at Quantico. It's the one that earned her a lot of lonely drinks at bars. The one that annoyed Nick so much. It's the one that people don't seem to understand, and she's just fine with it. "I'm supposed to just close my eyes and pretend I don't know where this place is once I leave?" She knows he'd been in the back of the van Baz and his team had arrived in, which meant it was likely he'd only pieced together certain roads, and not much else. She didn't like Baz's idea of getting Ressler out of here but she hadn't protested either. His mild concussion had been her obvious worry, but they'd supplied her with a suitable answer to put her at ease.

"Something like that, yeah."

* * *

It's the smell of sweat and burnt flesh that gets him first.

The sound of his body jerking against the cuffs.

The muffled grunt of pain when he's released from the electricity coursing through his body.

It's a show of agony upon a man who is both the unrelenting force and the immovable object.

There are no questions asked that first day. Round, after round, after round of physically weakening him. He remembers, of course, not all of it, but enough that he doesn't enjoy being here when Sam could have taken him anywhere else.

"What's the point, Sam?" Steely, aiming to remain as far removed as he can from this replay of his torture; a sick movie of something he'll work to forget at night.

"The point," Grim-faced and wincing, Sam watches as Red's former captors continue their interrogation, and Red finds it hard to look at his old friend. There is a veil of empathy written across Sam's face; a kind of knowing that comes from a hard life lived, given up, and fearful of returning. "Is you need to see how this life treats you."

Anger, a raging, inner demon, threatens to unleash itself his old friend, and Red clings to his stoic expression. He had never expected those words from his friend's mouth. The sort of damning insinuation that came along with his sympathetic tone. _As if I don't know what it does to me and the ones I love._ Red is more than aware of how this life treats him. He knows better than most, and he doesn't need to see it, as though it will make him have some grand epiphany concerning his life choices.

"I'm not talking about your nefarious activities, friend." Swallowed by the rapid _ticking_ of the stun rod being used against him again, he doesn't register that Sam seems to have read his mind. "I'm talking about your recklessness when it comes to your own life." Sam, like everyone else that claimed to care about him, draws Red away from the horror that is often present in his life, and towards the softer aspects of humanity. "You hate yourself, and you're waiting for the day when you're no longer _necessary_ for this life." Watching the amount of pain on his face just three days ago, Red is struck by this comment; a comment he can't deny or claim due to the simple fact that he didn't know if it was as valid as Sam inferred. Red loved life, in all it's simplicity and in all the oddities, the beauty and the gruesomeness. Adaption was just one way of ensuring he remained... _human._

"Why would say that?" Voice rough and brittle against the weight of his friend's summation, he tears his eyes away from his own pain and locks eyes with him. It's but the span of a few breaths, but that lag is enough to show Red just how much pain his friend is in before this glimpse of what was.

"The Raymond Reddington I know wouldn't have walked so willingly into the lion's den." He points at the table where Red lies panting from his captors' ministrations, where just one source of his current predicament lied. Red didn't recognize the stolid expression on his face as he watches himself gather up whatever resolve was left. The reprieve, he remembers, had been a blessing, and it had been a long time since his patience had wavered so greatly upon being tortured. Electricity had never been an easy combatant to face.

"I'm not that man anymore, Sam." He'd walked himself into the _back_ of one to many lion dens before this moment without hope of ever getting out again. Luck, God, fate...he was alive by some miracle and he was always keen to test how far those interventions would reach. But this time...he's ashamed to say he barely noticed the man tailing him until it was too late to shake him. The earlier version of him slips into unconsciousness, and Red looks back at Sam, a sad smile adorning his friend's features.

"There are worse things to be than a self-loathing man, Ray." This time, when Sam offers him the chance to get away from this place, he doesn't hesitate to take his hand.

* * *

It's a mansion.

He knows it by the hard wood, the expensive Dartmouth oriental silk rug on the floor under the desk, the carpentry, the bookshelves and their contents, the ripple in the glass of the windows that look out over a sprawling garden and lake. It's old, but parts of it are new; an ever expanding project to make it just right. It's one of his own. He'd acquired it after a friend of friend went belly-up due to a horse racing endeavor. He knew the bottomless pit that money could fall into if you didn't have the right animal. In too many ways, that sport was very much like his life; betting on the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time could spell defeat and death for the less fortunate.

It is the light that spills out from the bathroom that catches his eye; a rectangle cut out into the softly lit room. From it, soft sounds of cry reach them, and Red looks back at his old friend askance and devastated. Sam's lips press together and he shrugs, those wise and jovial eyes of his adopting a latent sadness. He appears rougher, somehow, not as young as he had in the piazza.

"Same rules as before, Ray." Red turns from him, stomach tense and lungs pleading for breath. Though he makes no sound, and she can't hear him, he still walks as though every step might alert her to his presence.

A step further would take him directly into the bathroom, but he stops. The mirror is empty, and he knows that he isn't really here, that he can't help her or guide her, that he can't take her in his arms and hold her tight. There would be no lulling, no soft bids to help her quiet herself. She wouldn't cling to him or dive into his embrace. It would simply be that he would watch her cry and suffer without him.

"You need to see it." Sam's voice is edged in something that Red does not wish to see on his friend's face, and so he peers around the wall of the bathroom door and finds her just as he imagined she'd be. Her head is pressed back against the wall across from the toilet, her knees drawn up so her elbows can rest on them, and her shoulders jerk with every, quiet sob she elicits. For half a second, he is angry that no one is there for her. That Dembe has left her to her own accord, that they are not down stairs having some semblance of a Christmas.

And then he notices the phone on the floor beside her and his eyes zero in on it when her teary face watches it buzz on the honeycomb tile. The sound rattles around the tiny space and he remains watching her from the door as he had watched his girls in the kitchen. The sorrow this brings about is a visceral thing, closer to who he is now versus who he'd been back then.

"Tom?" Confirmation settles heavily in his heart and Red takes a step further, propping himself against the bathroom counter for some stability. It isn't that he's surprised, but there's an odd mixture of frustration and defeat within him; a resignation he didn't normally entertain. "Yeah, I'm okay. I just-" The sound of Tom's voice through the phone speaker, cutting her off, makes him grip the counter top and if he weren't so distressed by what he was seeing he might have questioned his ability to touch everything but that which lived. "Yeah, we found him." She continues to listen to Tom on the other end of the phone, gives little answers by way of actual information, and Red tries to draw in a breath around frustration. "We're safe."

"Is this happening right now? In real time?" He turns to where Sam still stands just beyond the door frame and is shocked to find the wrinkles on his friend's face. A vague, five o-clock shadow has spread itself over Sam's cheeks and jaw, there are bags under his eyes, and his hair has started to grey again. "What's-?" In all his years since those fateful moments where his life took inevitable and harrowing turns for better and worse, he hadn't truly recalled Dickens's version of A Christmas Carol. " _You're_ my Ghost of Christmas Present." Which meant that Sam would keep aging until he'd shown Red what he needed to see.

"No, I don't want you involved, Tom." His attention wavers between Sam's silent, solemn figure and Lizzie. But it's her tone that draws his focus onto her. Her tears have let up, replaced by an irritation he knew to boil itself into the realms of anger and rage. "Because I said so. I appreciate it, really, but I'm not in danger here with-"

"It's almost time, Ray."

Time. He's aware that he nods, but it's dismissive. Time didn't really matter to him when Lizzie was talking to Tom. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Everything they'd overcome together unraveled with the appearance of Tom every few months. Karakurt's name comes up, and Red sighs, disappointed and just a little afraid that she'll settle for the idea that a simple confession will get the life back that she lost. _She's never going to be able to return to that._ And while he knows he should have told her, that he should have calmed her, sat her down, and discussed her future, seriously, with her...he thinks that it's too little too late.

She knows. She has to know that the possibility is minute. His eyes trail her bowed head, how her hair always seems to fall into her face, how her breathing is jarred and unsteady. How he wishes he could reach out and sweep her up and away from this conversation she's having, away from her sorrow, her nerves, her worries, and her uncertainties for a little while. _But I was selfish._ Always selfish with himself. Withholding and giving when the moment suited him. _So, I've lost the privilege._

"Ray." Sam is beside him, older still, and Red is prepared, offering his hand first.

* * *

They land in the middle of a field, and Sam staggers.

He is the picture of sickness. Haggard, drawn, the meager amount of graying hair on his head just as Red remembers it the last time he'd seen him. Red knows what's coming next, he knows the story, he knows why Sam is aging and why they have come to this unfamiliar place. And while his friend's coughing begins to drag a peculiar sense of panic into his own chest, Red can do nothing but support him; his hand wrapped around his friend's arm to hold him up, another placed gently on his back. Soothing motions and soft hushes to keep Sam from falling apart. _This is what I missed the first time around._ Lizzy must have been terrified when Sam battled cancer the first time. Alone, inexperienced with this kind of dying, and young...the things she'd gone through during her college years.

"You have to stop fighting it, Ray." Hand clutched to his chest, breathing ragged and painful, Sam extends his left arm to hold to his friend's shoulder; propped and sagging. "Not everyone you love will be taken from you." Another round of hacking coughs makes Red nod; an impulse to ease his friend.

"Sam," Placating, his wobbles and catches as he peers down at his friend's face, not enjoying the topic at hand. _Please, anything but this. Right now. Anything_.

Struck so suddenly by Sam's frailty, he guides his friend down into a sitting position, steadying him and maneuvering him gently into the ground. There was no easy way to make his churning gut calm down in the face of Sam's steady and tired gaze leveling with his own. So many things pass between them in the next moment that, should he survive this ordeal and remember it, Red imagines he'll be mulling it over for years to come.

 _Nothing about this was just a dream._ Sam's arm was too solid under his grip, his eyes too clear, too precise, his voice too physical. Bent there, looking at his friend, movement at the edge of the field catches his attention and he sees Lizzie moving off in the direction of the trees.

The faintest breeze tugs at the grass around him and Sam, waving in a sea of gold and wheat, rattling the thicker strands in a whisper hissed across time and space. She seems...tense, her shoulders up, hair pulled back into a pony tail. Something makes her hesitate as the shadows from the trees begin to swallow her and he feels himself frown. A gnawing realization starts to draw in on him from all sides and Sam grips his wrist in firm but gentle consolation.

"Love warrants a response from us, Ray." Lizzie slips into the trees and disappears from view as Sam's words sink in; all the weight and guilt of his most recent actions leaves him like Atlas in his punishment. Feeling as though he were bearing the world on his shoulders wasn't a new sensation. But sharing that burden, allowing some of it to be lifted...

_I wouldn't know how to let go._

He looks down at where Sam should be and finds the man has gone; vanished from sight as if he'd never been. The ghostly weight of Sam's hand on his wrist makes him reach for the place where it had been, rubbing away the sensation as best he could. Just like before, there was no goodbye. No hug. No apology. Just death and leaving. Red looks around, drawn by the beauty of this place and the peaceful sound of the wind through the field and the surrounding trees. It was the beginning of fall, by his estimate, and he imagines this place would be stunning in the summer. Green. Humming with bees and crawling with wildlife. Wildflowers blooming here and there. And always, _always_ , a cool breeze in the shade.

His eyes come to rest on the distant treeline where Lizzie had gone, and the moment he takes a step forward, a looming figure appears before him. Clad in black, a force, silent and deadly, pushing out all around it, sends him clambering a step or two back. Reeling, feeling very much as if the life has been sucked out of him, an icy fear crawling up his spine, he stares at the figure, who lifts its head and removes its hat, and he swallows.

 _Hard_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, that was waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy longer than I anticipated it being. Again, sorry for the wait! I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with this stupid chapter, but I hope you guys enjoyed it! Next chapter coming soon! (I swear, this time haha) thanks for sticking with me!


	4. Toska

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Thank you for the reviews and the follows! You guys rock! Just one more chapter after this one! Hope you like it!

Death stares back at him.

Familiar.

Striking.

_I am…_

This dark, imposing figure draped in his favorite cloth, a meticulous cut in pant, vest, and suit jacket, adorned in a well-chosen fedora, pieced together with a tie and an overcoat to drag on broad shoulders. Red regards the mirror image of himself on days where snuffing out various lives takes its bitter toll on him. All the edges of his face, the lifeless, chilling doppelganger, hold the whispers of destruction and turpitude. Every sin is marked, felt, exuded from this… _creature_ that stalks towards him through the grass; the silent harbinger of fear into the air about him.

Accepting of the irony but reticent to be shown this next leg of the journey, inwardly recoiling in the face of a judgment he'd been so ready to face numerous times before, he flinches when the grim feature of his own frustrated facial expression is tossed his way; a hand lifted in the direction of where Lizzie had disappeared just a short time ago.

There is no taking of this ghoul's hand. No words spoken that can coax him forward. It is as though Anslo's chain has dug into his chest again, and that searing, frigid sensation is there to tug him along with every step this devil takes in Lizzie's direction. Dragging him along, an invisible tether of soul and mind, it captivates Red in the most awful way. _To see one's own misery, one's own evil, one's own demise._ But when the painstaking journey into the trees is over and the babbling noise of running water fills the air, Red finds himself beside his reaper as Lizzie faces a lonely grave by the waterside. She is mid-rant, flustered, crying, her fists balled and shaking.

"Down." He feels the dark rumbling of his own voice from this awful specter beside him and he is unable to resist the heavy command as he falls to his knees behind Lizzie's enraged figure. The heaviness of the moment magnifies, piling again and again into the area until it stifles him with sorrow, with _fear_. He is wrought with longing once more, that familiar grief in knowing he cannot reach out for the one he cherishes. It is a sensation of paralysis and the desperate desire to move when he knows he can't.

"There were a dozen other avenues. A dozen other plays that we could have made to ensure you made it out of that place alive but you didn't take anyone's input! You stormed in there on your own, locked us in a fucking _bunker_ , and you-" she cuts off so harshly that he winces, staring at her as she presses the back of her hand to her mouth, breathing harsher than what he'd seen in the bathroom with Sam. A sick feeling of regret washes through him and he yearns to yell back. To defend himself as if he knows, deep down, the way he's betrayed his friends and his love for them. _For her._

"I'm sorry I haven't visited you in a few months, it's just…No matter how many times I come here," she watches the water, her head lifted and body bending to crouch before his grave. He wonders, looking at her, how many times she came to visit here. _Why? I'm not here. Go live your life! It's why I've sacrificed so much. Go, Lizzie. Go._ "I never feel at peace." Her voice is ruined by the emotion pressing to the back of her throat; a sound he can feel as though her fist has gripped his heart and pulled.

"Dembe and Kate took me on a road trip. Well, not exactly a road trip, it was more like a trip around the world. Aram came with us. You should have seen him in Mykonos." She aims for something happy to say, some sort of laugh. Red, unsettled, watches her flip between laughter and smiles before flopping into sadness. "Couldn't get him to leave Matoyianni street until we bought everyone a souvenir. I bought an Etro dress from Soho-Soho…figured you'd be proud of me for that one." She grows quiet again, her head bowing every so often as she attempts a deep breath.

"They took me to all your favorite places; let me meet the decent people you had in your life, even if some of them gave Aram a heart attack. That sweet old lady in Poland with the guns? _Seriously?_ " She swallows around the thickness in her voice, and he wishes, desperately that he could move so as to see her face and witness what is in her expression. This nonsense of only being able to see her from behind is madness. "That kind family you stayed with in Marrakech after you almost-" His eyes jump to every tense movement in her shoulders. Her back. Her neck. The sides of her jaw when she clenches it to steel herself.

"I made them take me to those places because I thought I would enjoy it. I thought it would…commemorate your life or something." A breeze picks up and stirs the fly-away hairs around her face. She brings a hand up to try and tame them behind her ears. "Every time we dined out or tried a local delicacy, I couldn't help but hear your stupid voice. Try the pho, Lizzie, it's absolutely to die for; Charles is the only man I know that takes his soup stock seriously. Don't shy away from the khash; it's a humbling experience, so try not to mind the head. Make sure you get a good cup of coffee with your rétes, Lizzie or it won't be worth it." Red can't help but smile when she tries to mimics his voice and, for a moment, there is a trace of fondness in Lizzie's tone that makes him draw in a sharp breath. All of these things, and more, had made his life beautiful, and the fact that she had gone and experienced some of those things…that Dembe and Mr. Kaplan had taken her…

"Dembe took me to visit Josephine. Red, if you had just-" Josephine's name slams into him and finds himself in a kind of panic. All of the contingency plans he had in place in case something happened to him, all those accounts and all that money for various people to be taken care of…he never accounted for Lizzie meeting one the few he held dear to himself. What she must think of him not being able to protect Josephine from a thug. What Dembe must have told her of his desire to make right his failure. What she must feel in light of it.

Her head drops so she's looking at her hands, balled up one moment, then fidgeting the next in her lap. Hands he's held. Hands he's kissed. Hands that tried to stem the flow of his blood on almost every close call over the years. Hands that held him back. Hands that used to clench in the extra fabric of his jacket in moments of weakness and relief. "You didn't share yourself with us! You just barreled forward. You weren't supposed to leave-" he flinches when she curses, rising to her feet, and he can only stare up at her in solemn horror for her expression as she turns her back on his grave and stares blankly in the direction they'd come.

"I miss everything, Red." Her face crumbles into a sorrow he can't console. She turns and faces his grave again, only this time, she moves to sit against it, to lean into it. He is overcome and, feeling a jarring sensation, he looks up to see that his silent self is frowning at Lizzie. "I miss how crazy my life was. It's still crazy, just in a different way. I'm not...me. How can I be? The last few years were unbelievable. How can I tell anyone new about a _life_ that feels so old? I've been fighting for so long, I don't know how to function, Red. I'm just... _lost_." Drowning. Trying to come up for air in an ocean with no surface.

Tears well up in her eyes; tentative things that threaten to spill on a lower eyelid that trembles. He watches her lift her sleeve to her eye to dab at them, burying her face in in her forearm before she draws it away.

"I miss you." Chin wobbling, she leans her head back against the tombstone and casts her eyes into the canopy of the trees overhead as her tears finally leak out the corners of her eyes. The water from the creek murmurs by and the tranquil sound sends him into motion, feeling anything but calm.

"Is this...?" He rises and rounds on the grim version of himself, facing the bemused and sinister expression on his own face as if it will scare him back into his place on the ground before Elizabeth. _Before death and the lack of reckoning_. "Is this the future?" But this murderous version of himself simply sizes him up and shoves him back a few steps. Red's heart is pounding as he watches himself evolve into the subdued rage that exists within him when he's settling a score. The tick under his eye twitches, a snarl forms on his reaper's face.

" _Down._ " Again, that heaviness weighs on his entire body, and though he fights the power being exerted on him, he can't hold himself upright. His legs shake, and his breathing comes in strangled gasps until he is on his knees; once more facing her. The sound of the overcoat whispers through the air as the ominous doppelganger moves behind him. There is a distinct note of critique in Red's mind as he wonders what purpose his Ghost of Christmas Future has in speaking when the original, if he remembers correctly, stayed silent throughout Ebeneezer's horror and pleading to make it right. _This can't be, this simply cannot be._

Looking at Lizzie, watching her grief overwhelm her, he hears the faint rustling of the figure behind him, of something metallic being weighed in hand. It isn't until she draws her knees up, wraps her arms around them, and rests her face against the fabric of her jeans as her body shakes, that his brain clues him in on what he is hearing.

"You know," Laden with a heavy baritone, his reaper's voice seeps into the air around him like his presence had when he first appeared. A dark cloud, a poison, a finale. A malignant wave of guilt, shame, demons, and regret. "Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit so he could read Hindu scripture. Specifically, Bhagavad Gita. And while his translation might have been off, that famous quote of his still echoes in the brightest and darkest of circles today." The cold, hard press of a muzzle at the back of Red's skull makes him close his eyes as he listens to his own voice recount the verse.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky…that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." He can feel the moment drawing down upon him as if he were aware of the end; the tension that holds him fast, the reality the same as the fear or indignation he's seen in countless victims before. Amid his anticipation, it's the small noises from her crying that tear him apart. The light of her, even in this broken state of all-consuming sorrow, doesn't diminish; an atomic flash of hope and salvation.

The sniffling, the gulps of air between sobs. Lizzie seems to be falling apart before him and there is no way for him to tell her that she isn't alone. _But she is alone._ He left her. He made sure to leave her and Dembe and undoubtedly Ressler and Baz. Kate…she would have known there would come a day, and if she had been willing to give Lizzie that trip, perhaps she doesn't hate him for his selfish martyrdom.

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The final excerpt of the verse hangs there in the air, and Red, on impulse, sucks in a breath to steady himself. Finished off by a thing that wears his worst attributes as if they were natural and not forged in fire and blood, loss and betrayal. "We're not so dissimilar to Oppenheimer, are we?" Thoughtful, resounding, all Red can do is open his eyes and drink in Elizabeth's folded features as she cries on against his grave; a cold stone that won't offer her any warmth or solace or truth.

"Just do it," Fractured and brittle, his voice is a hoarse thing. He wants to leave this place, this dream, this nightmare of a time. A sick churning in his gut makes his shoulders slump and he leans back to sit on his legs in defeat; no longer able to kneel as rigidly as before.

"There are protocols." Anslo's words echo through this version of him, and Red cants his head back, interested, but unwilling to look away from Lizzie. There was too much he needed to tell her. Too much that she would hate him for. Too much he could hardly think of without wanting to disappear from existence. _Forgive me, Lizzie. Forgive me, please, forgive me._ Useless, helpless, he remains with that gun pressed up against his head; a far cry from the auction at the King's, but similar in all the right ways. At least, this time, she was before him. A visual that didn't need to be concocted. _I just wish she wasn't…devastated…I'm not…_

"There it is." His voice from behind stops him mid-thought, and a cold sensation steels over him. There's a click, the sound of leather being strained as gloved hands clench, and then there is nothing but the fading image of Lizzie and her waterside grieving.

* * *

"Elizabeth," Dembe's gentle voice from the doorway startles her attention away from the setting sun outside the window in Red's room. She looks from Dembe's guilty smile to Red's still form. "Dinner's ready. The doctor said he won't be awake for a few more hours, if everything goes well." _If everything goes well._ If Mr. Kaplan, Dr. Renovich, or Dembe say that one more time, she might lose it. But she sets the book she had on her lap onto the chair cushion, having been too lost in her thoughts to even begin reading it, and makes her way to the door. She keeps Red in the corner of her eye as she passes by his bed, knowing that, if she turns to look at him again, she might not leave this room.

"What are we having?" It's a hushed question that she really has no interest in asking as she falls into step beside him while they head down the hallway. Still numb from her discovery earlier, from Dembe's debriefing of the information they acquired from the people holding Red, from her discussion with Ressler, from Tom's call...God, from _everything,_ the last thing she wants to do is eat. But Mr. Kaplan will give her that stare from earlier, and Dembe will look on her with his compassionate eyes, and that might be worse than shoveling a few morsels of whatever into her mouth.

"Mr. Kaplan has made us a stew," Liz wrinkles her nose a little and Dembe must have caught the gesture out of the corner of his eye, because he leans in and adds, "It's her specialty, trust me." There's conspiracy in his eyes and a slight smile to his lips when she looks at him. He goes ahead of her down the stairs, a subtle movement that lets him lead, and it takes her a moment, but she realizes that it's his habit; to proceed into a room that could, potentially, be full of danger. It's a bit ridiculous to imagine, especially with the team guarding this place, but it reminds her of the countless instances where he must have preceded Red down a staircase, and then followed him up another so he didn't get blindsided from behind. Seamless. Practiced.

He waits at the bottom of the stairs for her, a quiet hesitation that allows her to lead the way into the kitchen, and when she swings the door open, the smell of home collides into her, and she stops. Mr. Kaplan is scooping out portions into three bowls, but turns to stare at Liz, a quizzical expression on her face.

"It's beef stew." Liz looks to see the truth of it in Mr. Kaplan's eyes as she says it; voice lost amid the recollection of Sam cooking in their kitchen in Nebraska. In the cabin by the lake when she was a kid, when she was sick with strep throat, when they were snowed in. She can feel a warmth spread through her cheeks, and Liz, sensing Dembe holding the door open for her, moves determinedly to the table to take a seat. A moment or two later, a bowl is set down in front of her with a spoon. The steam weaves its way up from the broth, and she leans in to take a deep breath. It smelled exactly like-

"Are you alright, dear?" She doesn't know it, but she's closed her eyes, and when she opens them, she finds Mr. Kaplan reaching for her shoulder and dodges the comfort with an inelegant flinch.

"I'm fine." Liz snatches her spoon up from the table and moves the beef, potatoes, and carrots around a bit; feigning an attempt to cool it down.

"It's been a stressful day." She avoids Mr. Kaplan's stare, and merely nods before she endeavors to take a bite of the stew. The potatoes are seasoned in paprika, the meat tender and not overcooked, there's a slight kick, and the broth is...before she knows it, her vision is blurring and she shakes her head.

"You put cumin in this." Dembe and Mr. Kaplan smirk at one another, and the older woman rests her spoon in her bowl before she turns her full attention to her.

"It _is_ goulash, Elizabeth. What else would I put in it?" Goulash. But not just any Goulash. _Not to me._ A laugh gets choked out around Liz's tears and she smiles.

"Cinnamon and olive oil and and hot paprika and- are you two _trying_ to make me cry?" She isn't embarrassed, in fact she's grateful to them. It shouldn't surprise her that they have this recipe on hand, that Mr. Kaplan is an expert at making it, though she does wonder if she cooks it because Red likes to eat it after particularly hard days. In her mind, it wouldn't be a stretch for Red and Sam to have shared recipes at some point in their lives.

"No, but it's good to see you've come out of your stupor." Kaplan's droll reply gets a smile out of Dembe as he takes another bite, and Liz narrows her eyes a little, trying to discern whether or not she should respond seriously or with something witty. _Liars, the both of them._ She simply sits there, spoon in hand, and only takes up another bite once Mr. Kaplan has resumed eating. Their meal is spent, mostly, in silence, with Liz trying to control a smile every now and then when something happy crosses her mind. She still feels a bit disconnected, but the memories that her mind is conjuring up are full of light. They aren't the jumbled images of disarray from her past with Red.

Baz comes in to hand Dembe a phone, which has the three of them frozen in place for whatever news might be coming from the other end of it. He listens to the voice on the other end, a barely discernible murmuring, and he answers in a language that sounds a lot like Arabic, before excusing himself from the table. Liz watches him disappear through a side door to the kitchen, and discovers she has no idea where that door actually leads to. _This place is too big._

"Can I expect you to get a few decent hours of sleep or will you be resuming your spot in Raymond's bedroom?" Mr. Kaplan has turned to fix her with a quiet look of summation; weighing every little indication towards one answer or another. Liz looks down at her empty bowl and then at the door Dembe vanished through a moment ago. How was she supposed to sleep when Red was scheduled to wake up in a few hours? _If everything goes well_ , he could be up and about by as early as tomorrow, given how his heart sounds, how his lungs are functioning. "I thought as much." Mr. Kaplan rises and takes up her bowl, indicating Liz's empty one. "Would you like some more?"

"No, thank you." Distracted again, but eager to be of some use, Liz stands and takes her bowl and spoon before Mr. Kaplan can snatch it from her. "You did the cooking, I can do the dishes." Surprise lights the older woman's face, and she hands her bowl over to Liz a little _too_ quickly. By the time Mr. Kaplan has put away the leftovers and Liz has started in on the pot the stew had been prepared in, Dembe comes back in through the door he'd left by, and resumes his eating. He casts Mr. Kaplan a slight, but meaningful look, and, as if it were her queue, the older woman takes her leave. Not for the first time, Liz is struck by the fact that so much of the communication in this odd little circle of people, this _family_ , is done with a silent shorthand she isn't yet privy to. It's infuriating.

"Agent Ressler is back safely at the Post Office." Dembe sets his bowl beside the sink and Liz looks at him through a bit of hair that has fallen into her face from scrubbing out the pot. "He and the two Cabal members made it inside the building without incident, and our man is about to deliver the tapes we have from our own interrogations." She rinses the pot out and sets it to dry on the rack, and then she braces her hip against the counter when she faces him, arms folded across her chest.

"Ressler will take it from there, the team will investigate it, and then they might be more on board with this whole...," She extracts a hand to wave between the two of them, a frown drawing her features into a contemplative look. "Cabal mess." She looks down at Dembe's bowl on the counter, the last bit of her self-appointed chore, and then at the door she and Dembe had come through before dinner. How the hell was she going to approach the topic that lay festering inside of her all day? How was she going to discuss with the man a very private, but very personal, intimate event that concerned not just her, but _him?_ God, it concerned him more than she had ever imagined. After remembering that she killed her father, after Red confirming it the way he did...she had never seen him so torn up about anything like that.

"I'll wash out my bowl, Elizabeth." Dembe takes her gently by the shoulders and maneuvers her away from the sink, peering down at her in understanding and a shared concern for the man upstairs. "Go on up, it shouldn't be too much longer, now." With a bit of protesting on her part, admittedly halfhearted, he ushers her out of the kitchen. Lost in the dimness of the corridor alongside the stairs, Liz meanders her way up to the second floor and is halted by Mr. Kaplan and Dr. Renovich standing outside Red's door.

"How is he?" She closes the distance enough to lower her voice, and Dr. Renovich looks to Mr. Kaplan for permission before taking a deep breath.

"Better, actually." The surprise in his tone denotes that he had not been expecting such an outcome, and Liz feels herself take offense on Red's behalf, as if the man were personally insulting his ability to survive. "As I was telling Kate, his heart sounds normal, EKG was normal, compared to earlier." Earlier when his heart stuttered and nearly stopped, when he'd had another seizure, when they were sure that if his fever didn't go down that they were going to lose him. "We're concerned about his right lung. There's some crackling with his breathing but that could just be due to his having been lying in one position for three days under duress. We'll be monitoring that pretty closely."

 _The right lung._ Liz crosses her arms and catches the slight purse of Mr. Kaplan's lips at the news. It had barely been a month since he was shot, and he'd been off gallivanting around the globe with her, rescuing her, getting her out of the country, _lifting things_ that were probably too heavy for him to be lifting. _Like undercover cops bleeding out, and bags of supplies, and holding a man off the side of a building._ She'd seen the way he winced at times when they'd had to flee DC, how subdued he seemed for a few hours after the Arioch Cane incident, and she'd meant to ask, but he was so damn-

"He has a few electrical burns that were on the cusp of infection, some lacerations from the cuffs around his wrists and ankles, and a cracked fourth rib, some of the others are bruised. We've given him antibiotics to help with the infection, and we're flushing his system with fluids. His blood work came back showing levels of valium and norepinephrine bitartrate, and we'd like to give him another dose of phenobarbital for the seizures once his labs are clear." Liz can hear her heartbeat in her ears, and she shifts her weight to her right just enough to lean a little in the direction of Mr. Kaplan. Her strong, stolid presence a balm to Liz as the doctor continues on. "It's just as a precaution, mind you. If he's alert and his fever hasn't returned, we won't need to, and he might be able to clue us in on how many doses he was given. His vitals are steady for now, with just the slightest increase due to trauma his body has suffered. Same with his brain activity. Again, we won't really know the full extent of the damage done until he's awake."

It's a nice, clinical way of saying that the Cabal wasn't kind to Red while they had him, and if it weren't for Ressler stumbling upon their hideout, she and Red's team might not have gotten to them in time. Mr. Kaplan thanks the man and he tells them that he's just down the hall should they need him. Liz watches the doctor disappear into a room two doors down from Red's and finds Mr. Kaplan staring at Red's door, a distant look in her eye. The cleaner seems to sense that Liz is studying her, and she draws in a breath as though she were coming back to herself.

"When do you plan on speaking to him about what you saw?" Straightforward, a bullet to the gut. Liz should have been more prepared for such a question. For such a sharp look. But she isn't, and she takes a small step back from the slighter woman.

"I'm not sure." She looks at the knob on the door, wishes for nothing else but the chance to burrow into that chair she'd been occupying for the most of the day, to be there when he woke up, to assure him. _See his eyes. Hear his voice._ Any measure of comfort she could draw from his being conscious and lucid was like a fantasy after such a long few days. "I don't even know how I would start it. What I would say. Would I cry? Would I get mad at him? I'm so _tired_ of being mad at- I can barely handle thinking about it." Mr. Kaplan's bottom lip trembles and Liz is struck, deeply, by this sudden show of emotion. The softness with which the older woman takes her hands in hers, the way she squeezes them, how her eyes shine with tears for a moment before she shakes her head and bids them away.

"When it _does_ come up, remember that you fight the same war, Elizabeth." One of her hands sneaks up and touches her cheek, and Liz keeps her eyes riveted to the typically stoic and immovable cleaner. It's enough to make her indignation at her comment fizzle. _We can't fight the same war when we aren't on equal ground._ She wants to say it so badly, wants to move away from the tenderness with which Mr. Kaplan is handling her, right now, but she can't. She just can't. "You deserve to know the truth, but when you ask for it, know that the way you feel is the way he feels too. Whatever good it's done you, he's trying to protect you, but he's also afraid to lose you."

Mr. Kaplan leans past her to turn the knob and, before Liz can formulate a question as to what the hell that last part meant, she finds herself engulfed in the tentative quietude of Red's room once again. It smells, faintly, of whatever antiseptic they used to clean Red's side when they changed the bandages; a routine they'll have to fall into until he's healed. Burns, even electrical ones, were known to be temperamental. Though, she supposed he knows all about how temperamental burns can be. Liz winces as she steps up to the side of his bed; her eyes drawn to the vitals on the screens.

The steady sound of his breathing is interrupted by a sharp exhalation, and Liz looks down to see his brow is furrowed, his face sweaty. She leans over to rest the back of her hand to his head and is relieved to find that he doesn't seem to be running a fever. His breathing becomes a bit more distressed, and she glances up at the screens to see his heart rate has spiked a little bit more. She reaches for his hand and takes it in hers, notes how cold they are in stark contrast to their usual warmth. Sitting on the edge of the bed now, and mindful of his side and the bandage around his wrist from where the cuffs dug in, she tries to soothe him.

Between her attempts to hush him, and his, clearly, troubling dream, she wonders if he'll ever let her in, if he'll ever let her help him the way he's helped her; if she'll ever be able to comfort him or hold him up when he needs it. _Let me care about you._ _Let me help._ But as he quiets and she watches his vitals on the screen, she knows that she'll have to fight him every step of the way if she wants to break through the iron curtain he protects himself with. Feeling exhaustion tug at her, Liz abandons the thought of that chair by the window and moves, instead, to the chair that Mr. Kaplan had, no doubt, situated beside his bed; a convenient barrier between Red and whoever came through the door. She notes, though the size of the room is impressive, that there's just enough space between the door and the chair for her to be on her feet and ready if the moment arises. But they were safe here. Dembe was downstairs. Kaplan was in the room across the hall. Baz and his team were scouring the grounds around the mansion and property. Her team was probably following a few leads by now. Their latest battle against the Cabal was a success.

 _They were fine_.

* * *

When Liz wakes next, it's to a crick in her neck. The dim light of pre-dawn creates an eerie atmosphere in the room; elongates all the shadows, and somehow makes the darkness _deeper._ As she rolls her head back and forth, a hand grasping and massaging the sore area, she looks to the bed and finds in empty; blankets tossed back, IV pole missing and heart monitor paused. For a moment, there's utter panic in her chest, and she finds herself on her feet as if to run. _Run after him, run for help, run away..._ But there's a distinct shadow cast across the bed where he should be, and she looks up to find him leaning heavily against wall just beside the window, across from where she'd sat before dinner.

"Jesus, Red, you scared the hell outta me." The statement encompasses the last few days and her startled leap from her chair when she realized he wasn't where he was supposed to be. "Red?" He hasn't looked back at her, hasn't even canted his head to indicate he's listening. There's no cheerful greeting, no pleasant or pained smile in her direction. A chill races through her. He's shrouded in the wan light; half in darkness, his figure hunched, jaw clenched. She drags the blanket from the bed with her and rounds the bed so she can see his face a little more clearly. His eyes, still hidden by the shadow from the wall, seem to be staring out at the grounds as if he were completely lost in thought. It isn't until she's three feet from him, her heart in her throat, that she catches him watching her from the corner of his eye before he bows his head, eyes blinking as though he can't keep them open. His lips draw in to a grimace as he means to stand up away from the wall's support.

"You know, you really shouldn't be up." Soft, coaxing, she steps up and places the blanket around his shoulders; careful of his IV and the stand. He flinches a little at its weight, and she freezes, her hands up by his shoulders, ready to lift the blanket off of him. But he turns to her, and one of his hands reaches to adjust the blanket in quiet gratitude. He looks at her, then, exhausted and restless all at the same time. There's an uneasiness about him, a burning sleeplessness that she seems to absorb into herself as her heart begins to pound again. "Are you okay?" He looks like he's about to drop when he leans back against the wall again, head turned lethargically towards her as her question and gentle tone seem to register.

"No."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have most of the next chapter written so I hope I can find a satisfying end for this fic. Thanks for reading!


	5. A Fool's Paradise pt. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Disclaimer, see chapter one. Okay guys! Here we go. I was having a hard time making it shorter and I didn't want to dump a huge chapter on you, so this is going to be a two-part ending. Sorry to have kept you all waiting! And thank you for sticking with this story. I have to say I struggled with it because the dialogue just wouldn't come out right, and I didn't want it to be crappy haha.

Anything would have been better than the raw honestly with which he answers her. Having half expected him to grumble an "I'm fine, Lizzie." Or a "nothing I haven't experienced before." Or even that sad smile he sometimes hides behind, it takes her a moment to realize he isn't going to say anything else.

"No."

It's as if she were slowly breaching the top of a roller coaster, the pull of the plunge coming at any moment. His quiet admission, coupled with these fragile hours of morning, flushes her stomach with that sudden, dropping sensation. _No_ , everything is not alright. _No_ , I'm not going to tell you why. _No. No. No._ Was it worth asking him why? Was it a gamble when she figured he'd dodge the question? Shaking herself from her current train of thought, unwilling to fall into the dark pit that is her eternal frustration over his inability to give a straight answer for more specific questions, she reaches for his right elbow through the blanket.

"Let's get you back in bed, okay?" She tugs lightly and he stiffens, a reaction that has her tensing as though he's about to swat her away. "What?" Through the dark, he fixes her with a tired expression and his lips turn down into a scowl.

"I can't remember," He licks his lips and his eyes shift to squint into the dark beyond the window. There's a shakiness to his right hand as he carefully reaches to bring the IV stand around so that he can clutch the cold metal. Caught by the motion, Liz watches the tendons on the back of his hand flex as he grips it tightly.

"Can't remember what?" Her question seems lost on him long enough for her to feel another splash of anxiety in her stomach, the sensation stealing her breath away. Her days and nights have been filled with fear, but it was a remote reaction to the events of the last few months; a catalyst that allowed her to keep moving forward. This fear was something else. It froze her. It brought on a helplessness she wasn't accustomed to feeling when the tools to help him were all around her.

"The reason." His low voice accompanies a sudden wave of fatigue on his part, and she barely catches the look in his eyes; the glossy expression of someone trying to stay awake against all odds. In this light, at this hour, with all the measures they've taken to ensure he survived what had been done to him...Liz can't be sure he's lucid enough to have this conversation. If it's real. If he knows he's speaking to her. She could keep asking him questions, drag him down the tracks of this train of thought, but she doesn't think he'll recall this in the morning.

"Red," She moves around to face him, squeezes past him and the IV pole, her back brushing against the chair opposite of the one she'd been using the day before. The chill coming in through the glass of the window whispers against her right arm, the side of her face, her neck, and it sends a small shiver down her spine. The cold wakes her up, and she finds that he seems to be paying attention to her now. "You with me?" _You're scaring me._

He blinks at her, subdued and troubled, and then drops his gaze to the floor; making a noncommittal movement with his head. Shifting a little, Red moves to sit on the window sill and makes a feeble attempt to use his left arm to brace himself. Liz is already reaching for his forearm by the time the aforementioned limb gives out on him. There aren't many places she can touch without causing him some kind of pain. Her grip is gentle, but firm, and he's using the IV pole to steady himself, drawing the thing closer to him as he falls into a seated position with a soft exhalation of air. She leans her hip against the sill and watches him breathe, watches a sweat break out across his face, watches him wince, watches him close his eyes and lean into the frame where the window meets the wall.

"You can't pass out here." Quiet and worried, her voice resonates in him, and pulls him from wherever his wandering thoughts and concentration had led him. Liz knows he's in pain, knows that the tiny struggle of sitting down just now cost him valuable energy, and she knows that he might not make it back to the bed without some major assistance. _Assistance I can't give him._ A shiver disturbs his figure, and Liz slides a little closer so that she can adjust the blanket around him, her eyes falling to the partially opened hoodie he's wearing.

At this angle, and the way he's positioned himself, she can just make out the stark white of the bandages that cover the electrical burns on his side, and she doesn't have to imagine the bruising that's deepened around the area. It wasn't like she'd made herself scarce when they checked him over earlier in the day, nor had anyone kicked her out.

_There was no point in hiding anything from her anymore._

"I feel like I'm underwater." She startles a little when she looks up to find his eyes resting on her own, his expression pinched. His comment could mean a lot of things, but mostly it reminds her of sitting beside him in the park, her hand in his, and she marvels at how life has flipped their prospective roles this time around. She reaches to grab his hand, turns it over, and smoothly applies a light pressure to his pulse. It takes a moment to find it under the bandage around his wrist, but it's there; strong, but just a little fast for her liking.

"You've had a helluva week." She knows her smile is sad when it graces her face, and knows that the small, startled frown he exhibits isn't only because of his discomfort. He stares at her with apologies trying to breach the silence in the room; the words neither forming or being said. But the look doesn't disappear, and after a few, unsteady breaths, he looks as lost as ever. "Can you take a deep breath for me?" She watches him swallow and she wonders if he's heard her before she hears him attempt to draw in a big breath through his nose. It was going well until his entire body tensed and the hand she was holding disappeared from her grip to wrap around his middle. His body is jostled by barely contained coughs, and there's pain written across his face as he tries to regulate his breathing again. "I'm going for help."

"No, no," His voice is strangled by his lack of breath, but he has enough strength to unwrap his arm from around his torso to grab at her arm as she stands. A movement that leaves him wincing and panicked. "No, Lizzie, just...give me a moment." She hates this. She hates seeing him hurt and in pain. Hates seeing him in peril. It undoes her in all the ways she remembers from when she couldn't get to him after Garrick took him, from when she'd found him unconscious and not breathing, from when he'd almost died at the King auction, from when he'd been shot. That unending fear at war with her anger, the desperation trying to claw its way out of her chest.

"You were _tortured_ for almost three days by the Cabal," Though her voice is measured, she feels anything but calm as he looks at her through pained-filled eyes. "So either I get help or you get back in bed." No matter what he chose, he was going to end up lying down like he should be. He needed to be resting, to be getting well. _I need him to be resting and getting well._

"I don't want-" He means to shift so that he's a little more upright, but by the tightening grip he has on her arm, he's in too much pain to do anything else but prop his shoulder up against the window frame. "ah- I don't want to sleep anymore, Lizzie." It's hard to tell, but she thinks there's anxiety in his voice, in his eyes, in the way he quietly implores her to do something, _anything_ , for him but _that._

"You don't have to sleep, you just have to _lie down_." He wasn't going to win this, no matter how distraught he appeared and no matter how much it killed her to deny him whatever it was he wanted. _He can't just stay here._ "If you don't rest, you could overdo it, and you could-" Her voice breaks at the end, and it appears to strike him; stilling the wildness in his eyes, the labored breathing, the determination that kept him trying to remain where he was.

"That bad?" Resigned and curious, Red gentles his grip on her arm.

"Yeah," She says with a sigh, settling herself beside him on the window sill once more. " _That_ bad." This fragility that surrounds him, for how human it makes him, sitting there in the proximity of it, letting her knee fall against his, it's almost too much. When things fall away and the veil is torn down, all she can see is someone desperately vulnerable, and she can't rid herself of the love she feels. It's not a decision, she just _knows_ , and there isn't anything she can do about it. In the hurricane that is her life, somehow, Raymond Reddington is the eye of the storm.

"Help me," He stands with an uncoordinated balance and weak legs. The blanket she'd placed around his shoulders falls away and lands on the sill behind them. Liz moves under his left arm so he can wrap it around her shoulders as soon as he starts to move. Careful of every part of him, Liz grips his waistband with her right hand so that she doesn't have to hold him up by his abdomen, and then helps him right himself. It's not something she would call standing, but it's enough to get him back in bed. He's careful with the IV pole as they round the bed, and by the amount of exertion he's displaying in this short walk, it's a marvel he made it to the window by himself the first time.

The ten or so feet until he's lying down again have completely sapped him of energy. Liz gently grasps his right elbow and bicep once he's sitting down, moving the IV pole with her foot so that the lines don't pull. A rough sigh peters out of his nose and she watches his body tense. Familiar with that form of exhaustion herself, she moves his legs under the blankets on the bed, pulling them up to his waist, and then frets over the position of the pillows; asking him mundane questions about his comfort as he tries to breathe around the way his body is settling, and receives only a few, terse confirmations that she's helping.

She thinks he's drifted off when she stops getting a reply from him, but his jaw is clenched and, although his breathing is a bit steadier, the way his left hand is fisted tells her that he's awake still. She looks to the heart monitor and at the leads that should be plugged into the pads on his chest, and is bothered by the fact that she didn't hear him when he'd gotten up earlier. _At all._ Something horrible could have happened to him if she hadn't fallen asleep in this uncomfortable chair.

He could have fallen. He could have hit his head. He could have injured his side more. He could have torn the scabs open on his wrists and ankles. The slight movement of his eyes sliding back open makes her look to him again, and she knows that she should move to hook the lines back up to the pads on his chest, but she reaches for his right hand instead, holding it between both of hers and rubbing her thumb over his knuckles.

"Why don't you want to sleep?" The question breaches all sorts of boundaries and seems moot, because she's pretty sure she _knows_ why. It's the same reason she has during difficult nights. It's the same one that kept both of them up after the harrowing events of Arioch Cane's hit on her and making sure Dembe would survive. It's the same one that kept them driving through the night after she shot that undercover cop. His eyes shift over to her, and she sees him fight unconsciousness with the heavy way he blinks.

"Dreams," He says, swallowing thickly as he shifts a little on the bed; his left hand coming to rest on his stomach. "Nightmares." It's a stark thing, this sharp laugh that coughs its way into the room from the back of his throat; a scoff with all its intended ironies. "Is it Christmas?"

"Morning of," Clipped and matter of fact, she finds herself nodding, a sudden wave of nervousness washing through her. How was she ever going to bring up what she's seen? How she feels or what it means for them? She's starting to drift into dangerous territory with her train of thought when she feels his hand between hers tighten. Anchored, her eyes meet his through the growing daylight coming into the room, and she squeezes back.

"Merry Christmas, Elizabeth." It makes her laugh because all of this is so ridiculous, and she can see that it confuses him, but somehow it pulls a smile onto his lips as well. She thinks he looks oddly relieved, as if there's some sort of spell that's been broken, that there's no duplicity in the moment.

"Merry Christmas, Red."

* * *

By evening, his fever has spiked again.

His coughing worsens.

It's three days of fear and pneumonia before he starts to show signs of getting better. Three days of intermittent delirium and lucidity, being nervous about his heart rate and his ribs. Three days of rotating ice packs and holding silver basins for him to cough up mucus into. Three days of her, Dembe, Baz, and Kaplan discussing ways in which they'll be able to pull off staying here for a month, at the least. Three days of vigilant and worried people taking turns sleeping and staying up to monitor him.

And then those three days give birth to a week and a half of fatigue, and Dembe leading a grumbling and winded Red around the house, out onto the the patio for a _few minutes only_ because the cold isn't the best remedy for pneumonia. It's long days of snowfall and playing rummy with Kaplan even though Liz always wins, and the cleaner is almost always sure that she's cheated in some way because _no one_ beats Katherine Kaplan that many times in a row.

It's going out into the back of the property with Dembe on New Years to have conversations with Aram via a satellite phone about where they are on exposing the Cabal. It's news that some of the journalists Red sent to sniff out the trail have disappeared or been killed, but not enough of them to raise any red flags in the community. It's a quiet and surprising,

"Happy New Year, Liz." From Samar once Aram hands over the phone, because of course they'd be in on this as a team. It's, not for the first time, wondering why they haven't included Ressler or why they feel they can't trust him.

More pressingly, that week and a half takes Liz by the hand, and by the heart, and suddenly her future does an about-face.

Her fidelity, her bravery, her integrity can never rest in the life she used to want.

Those three things...she has them in spite of that.

* * *

He knows that she knows.

That there is something he won't talk about. And while that's not a new revelation between them, he knows that she knows it pertains to his most recent abduction. He's quieter. His laughter falls into thoughtful moments where his eyes grow dark and his mouth twists. He catches her staring at him as if there's a secret way into that head of his; some door she hasn't tried, some lock she left unchecked. But it's more than that. He remembered.

He remembered kneeling there in the grass with a monstrous part of himself talking about destruction and atom bombs, and how his dedication to her, to his plans, to his vengeance, led to his name on a gravestone and Lizzie crying against it. He remembers Sam, and Lizzie talking to Tom on the floor of the bathroom that he _knows_ exists just down the hall from his room. He remembers the memories of his girls and of Lizzie screaming at him through the flames. He remembers figuring out that he doesn't deserve these people in his life that love and care for him. He remembers figuring out that someone, somewhere, something, pulled a string and delivered him back to them. _To her._

But it's what he _knows_ that keeps him up at night.

That he would choose that future a thousand times over if it meant she was alive to grieve him in the end.

It has never been whether or not he gets to live or die. He's come to so many terms over the course of his life with what he thinks he deserves and what he knows he surely doesn't, that life and death are antiquated terms overshadowed by his survival and his existence. So, like all the times before, when the water was churned and the depths returned to a murkiness that satisfied his guilt, sadness creeps in. Late at night. Early in the morning. There's a stirring in his chest, in his gut, that shakes him into restless places: the chair at the table, the corner of the couch, the wall near the window where the light comes in.

It's there, in those hours, that she finds him. His hands are unsteady. His breathing is shallow; lungs constricted by whispers of years passed. The veneer is washed away with those trembling fingers that fidget where they lay. His eyes are glass. His lips are sketched into lines between racing thoughts and the tremulous shadows of regret. It's in those moments where she finds herself bending down before him, a hand out to steady him.

He's tried to hide the emotions drudged up over the past weeks. He's tried to play it off. And usually she buys it, but something urges him forward tonight, as though borrowed time were actually a thing. He gently takes her wrist in his hand, brow furrowing as he draws a thumb over her scar. The moment builds, the dream playing over again in his mind, the memory so far away and so present that, like this burn that's mottled her skin, he can't ignore it. _Love demands something of us._

"I should have watched you better that night. I-" Always so immediate and unexpected, she takes his hands to still them. To warm them. To quiet the emotional tempest within him that feels as though it's trying to break out and infiltrate the room. He's frustrated, for half a second, because this is what she's wanted from the beginning: answers. At least some of them. But he's captured by her nervousness and he can't tell which of them is more unsteady.

* * *

"Shh, stop." She swallows, licks her suddenly dry lips, and watches his hand brush along her scar. "Just, shush, okay?" Was now the time? He'd brought it up and here she was trying to make him be quite. Though, she reasons, that maybe it's not so much to make him stop talking as to calm the waters a bit. His eyes seek hers and she's looking at his forehead, the slight sheen she sees gathering there.

She knows he's looking at her, but she avoids him and makes her eyes travel down the side of his face to the faded scar shed given him the day they met. Her gaze travels down to his chest, rising and falling heavily as if she were sitting on it. Beneath the rumpled button-down shirt lies that scar from when he'd caught that bullet, a scar that was now accompanied by healing electrical burns. More scars to add to his already damaged body.

Finally, finally, she lets her eyes hold his; a rush and a sense of peace colliding within her. He turns his head a little, and she becomes aware that their hands have not been idle, thumbs drifting quietly across one another's knuckles in a comforting gesture. A silent question is posed to her through the dark, the tilt of his head beckoning her response. Her lips draw into a thin line, a smile that begets tears and just the smallest bit of guilt. It's the smile of a secret keeper.

And, true to form, with her eyes listing towards the space where his skin disappears behind the shirt he's wearing, he draws in a big breath. The way he's looking at her, reacting to her, that slight movement _away_ from her proximity, to lean back into the sofa, reminds her too much of the day she asked him if he killed Sam.

"When did you find out?" She can tell that he's aiming for calm, but his voice falls into that steeled reticence of one who doesn't want to discuss a difficult truth. She's heard that tone far too often in the last few years. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, she finds it's just as hard to speak as he does. " _When_ , Lizzie?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright! The first part of the last chapter is done. Thanks again for reading! I hope to have the last part up soon! I have half of it done, so it shouldn't be long. Sorry if this chapter is kinda slow, it's a bit of a filler. Red had to get better haha somewhat.


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